My biggest fear of letting my young kid play alone outside is getting hit by a car.

That's why you have an emergency backup child for redundancy in case of failure of the main child.

When I was a kid I was taught not to walk in the street.

When you walk, you go in the opposite direction of cars and can see them coming and, if necessary, move off to the side more.

I know it's survivorship bias, but it worked for me.

Now I get that population density is increasing, and probably so is traffic. Though so are automatic safety features that cause cars to brake rather than hit things.

Are there statistics on vehicular fatalities in suburbs?

For real. Way too many people drive around our neighborhood way too fast and looking at their phone the whole time. Of course they’re also driving their enormous pedestrian-crusher trucks.

I don't think roads were ever considered a safe area to play. Even in cities in 80 the bugger roads were too busy. This is why cities need spaces for people including youth and teens not just playgrounds for toddlers. Yes traffic is more dense and faster, cars get bigger etc. but aren't cars also safer? I have heard the cars in the USA are crazy big which has larger dead angles particularly bad for smaller humans.

Of course; that's the only reasonable conclusion from a straightforward reading of the risk profile for children after they age out of drowning and before they age into opioid overdose.

The lion's share of loving a child is intervening in proportion to actual risk.

As a society, that means, more than any other single reform, relieving our cities of the burden of maintaining lethal, taxpayer-funded compatibility with the auto industry's machinery.